Stephen's Graduation Party Speech

Everything's Changing - Nothing Much Has Changed

Putting together a video compilation for Stephen's graduation party was a bitter sweet experience. It was fun to find so many old video tapes of Stephen as a baby, but sad to realize that 20 years has passed so fast.

Stephen was born without incident - the obstetrician’s first words were “I’ve delivered lots of babies, and let me tell you, that is one good-looking kid” – nothing much has changed much there.

Stephens’s first and favorite toys were balls - he had a set of crystal plastic balls with shiny spinners inside - slept with them in his crib. Went to sleep with his balls in his hands every night. – nothing much has changed there - still sleeps with his balls in his hands.

One summer at my parents house on Cape Cod, Stephen learned to hit a baseball - hit it over the roof of the house almost as soon as he learned to swing - certainly nothing much has changed there.

When he learned to ride a bike without training wheels, I was proud and excited - but as I watched him ride down the street, my stomach twisted in a knot - it was a selfish knot - I didn’t want him to grow up - I didn’t want him to not need me...but, I forced a smile, gave him a high five, and we moved on to the next pressing thing.

It seems looking back, that Stephen's entire childhood was condensed into 40 minutes of rushing to practice, hurrying to games, and popping McNuggets while tying skates in the back seat. I still have scars on my hands from pulling those laces, 'tighter, daddy, tighter’.

Then one day, he tied his own skates - and that ugly twisty-stomach feeling came back.

When Stephen's beloved coach, Steve Henley, died suddenly our parenting skills were put to the test. I thought my job as a Dad was to make pain go away - clean the booboo, put a band-aid on it, and kiss it all better. But there was nothing I could do or say to make this all better. I've never felt quite so inadequate as a father – all I could do is be with him as he struggled with his grief and mourned his loss. Those of you with kids know there is no pain worse than your kid’s pain - and there is nothing worse than not being able to make your kid’s pain go away.

Then one he drove himself to practice - and for a minute I was relieved because driving him everywhere was really a pain. Then as Pam and I were driving alone to his game that weekend, that twisty thing was back in my stomach.

But whether he needed us or not, we went. Pam never missed a game, and I went whenever I could. Although Stephen would never admit it, he always looked to see if we were there in the stands. Of course, he didn’t wave or anything - that wouldn’t be cool, but we knew he knew and that was enough.

Then one game when I wasn't there, tragedy struck. I was standing on the San Diego shoreline watching the most beautiful sunset when the call came. I will never forget Pam's voice, Stephen was hurt - badly hurt – might never play again. I dropped the cell phone, and balled my eyes out.

Stephen's stoic determination and courage in facing that injury still amazes me - he never complained, never pitied himself, never looked back - he marched on, and the results speak for themselves. He used the same strength in breaking into social and academic life at BB&N, and I know he will draw from it to succeed at Holy Cross and beyond.

People often come up to us - complete strangers sometimes - to tell us that we should be proud to have such great kids. We do have great kids - strong, smart, good-looking, sweet, kind, courageous, and tough. We are proud of them, yes, and we are privileged to have been the job of raising them - to have been allowed to be their mom and dad.

So now that Stephen is a grown man, we can look at the sum of our collective parenting of him, the hours, the talks, the money!, and the accounting shows a very, very positive return on investment.

As he is preparing to ride down that road towards his own life, his own freedom, and his own future - I have to tell you, that very selfish, very twisty feeling is back with a vengeance. I am proud, bursting with pride, excited at his accomplishments, and I very much do and do not want him to go...

Stephen, son, I love you very much – and nothing much will ever change there.

Payback is a Perk

Vibhoosh Gupta, one of my Babson students from last year, stopped by the booth at Interop.

He's with Motorola.

Last year, he was an engineer - with good ideas and good busines sense. He always seemed somewhat frustrated to me, and I was happy to hear he wanted to move into marketing.

He stopped by last week to tell me that he had indeed moved to a Market Development role - he had come up with a great idea - taking fiber directly into commercial buildings and distributing it to the desktop in place of ethernet cabling. Benefit is pretty straightforward - no power required for switches, no switch closets, hi-performance, and total security (no EMI emission to tap). Vibhoosh ran with the idea, put a business plan together, got it approved and launched it at Interop.

He was nice enough to say that he was able to use his learnings from my class in doing so.

It meant a lot to me that I was able to help someone along the way - you never really know, do you? The reason I teach is to give something back - pay forward in reverse, I guess - and in the case of Vibhoosh, it seems to have worked. Made my day.

Boy, I hope he's successful with the idea, and if not, I sure hope he took good notes during the "starting from scratch is hard" class about getting up, dusting off, and starting over again...after you fail...once, twice, or a dozen times...

TechValidate

Brad O'Neill showed me his idea for TechValidate in the lobby of the New York Hilton at SNW a couple of years ago.



I loved it then, and I love it a lot more now. StumbleUpon was a pipsqueak of an idea compared to TechValidate.



As long as I have been doing this - marketing black boxes to IT geeks, that is - it's been near impossible to get and keep customer references.

This dearth of referencable customers leads to half a dozen thorny problems.



- Editors won't let reporters/writers do stories without customer quotes. Even if you have the best mousetrap since cheese, you can't get anyone to write a story about it.



- Frustrated writers/reporters can't publish even their most interesting stories.



- Prospects won't buy unless they can speak to a customer.



- Salesreps drive marketing crazy asking for references.



- Customers who do make themselves available quickly get besieged and 'burn out'



- Salesreps lucky enough to have customers willing to take calls, horde them like squirrels horde nuts, and won't let other reps (or marketing and PR people) get to them for fear of 'burning them out'



This friction in getting, keeping, and managing customer references creates scarcity and high cost. Industry analysts fill the void - for a price - acting as a proxy for real customers, offering quotes to press releases and reporters, opinion (expert or not) on the value of the product to customers, etc.



Along comes Golden-Hand O'Neill - OK, arguably with a bit of a chip on his shoulder for industry analysts perhaps - and innovates a tool that blows up the whole mess.



Talk about disruptive...



TechValidate lets customers offer their honest opinions directly and anonymously, but verifiably.

Writers and editors can now write stories with validated quotes, without the hassle of getting permission.



Prospects can get validated experiences from real customers to increase their comfort levels.



Salesreps can confidently make claims of value based on validated customer response.



Marketing people can stop fighting alligators and get back to draining the swamp.



Just once, please, can't I have a brilliant idea like this that will make me $10 or $20 million...?



Just once?

Wow

Dave Donatelli leaving EMC. Wow.

DD at HP. Maybe. Probably Not. Wow.

Huge loss either way.


On Meyers/Briggs tests I'm always an INTP - which makes me a pretty good strategist - analytical, perceptive. I can usually sense industry moves BEFORE they happen.


But holy-batman-in-blue-tights-and-red-cape-with-a-big-S-on-the-chest...I sure didn't see this one coming.


Dave and I go back a ways - 1993-4 I think. He was pushing EMC to go multi-vendor when I was pushing DEC Multi-Vendor StorageWorks. We were both anti-authority change agents and competitors of sort. He was fighting against EMC's success in AS400 and IBM mainframe storage. I was fighting against the failure of DEC.

I interviewed with him once for a job at EMC. But, during the meeting, he told me about taking an MBA program in Chicago while living in Boston. That introduction to the Kellogg North America program changed my life. I followed Dave to Kellogg, but not to EMC, the year after he started, and one of the proudest moments of my life still is graduating at the top of the class while my father was still alive to see it.

The comparisons sort of end there though - Dave stayed at EMC. I quit Compaq to chase the startup dream. Last year, Dave made five and a half million dollars...let's just say, I didn't.

Despite his reputation as a very tough cookie in a box of tough cookies, Dave deserves a spot in the Storage Sanity Hall of Fame. There probably hasn't been a more influential hand behind the scenes in the storage industry for 15 years.

And, honestly, even though I did graduate at the top of the class, he was always smarter than me...we will all be better off as an industry if the courts let him work somewhere.

Something we all beleive in...

Today, Illinois' new governor, Pat Quinn, proposed a 50 percent increase in the income tax rate stating that it was based on "...something we all believe in -- ability to pay..."

Mr. Quinn - we don't all beleive in Marxism.

Karl Marx's famous - "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" - is the central communist idea - that the most productive should be forced to pay for what other's receive from the state for free - only because the most productive, as a result of their productivity, have the means to pay.

This socialist philosophy - which so scares MOST of us to our bones - is based on the twisted and debased principle that the people exist to serve the state.

Of, by, and for, Mr. Quinn. Of, by, and for.

This democracy exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. The government exists to provide benefits and protections to the VAST MAJORITY of its citizens. It exists because we will it to exist, not because it forces itself upon us.

We all agree that government has worth. We respectfully can disagree about how much it should do, and how much it should cost.

But when we start losing sight of the role of government we risk losing the country itself. Here it is again, just in case Mr. Quinn, or any of the rest of our leaders need a refresher.

"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

It is simply amazing that the last 6 months have so changed us, that we now numbly accept, in the tenor of public discourse, the very concepts and ideas that generations of Americans gave their lives to protect us against.

I just got ripped off...

Google finally got me...

I overran the free storage limit on my google account, and they made me pay $20 for another 10GB for a year. What a rip!

I could have bought a TB network drive from Dell for $179.

Let's see ... that's 1,099,511,627,776 bytes at $179 (call it $200 with tax and shipping) or $0.00000000018 per byte.

Take 6 or 8 zeros off and I'm still getting a whopping, I coulda had a V8, headache.

My first 1 TB storage system was the Digital StorageWorks Enterprise Storage Array we introduced in 1993/4. It came in 3 fully loaded 19" racks and cost over a million dollars.

Doh....

A virtual world of virtualness

I wrote this a while ago, but returning from Nice last week, it still strikes me as somewhat prescient - if I do say so myself.



Kirby's Sub-theorem #2 - Virtualization eventually surrounds and commoditizes every IT resource

Ultimately, IT infrastructure will be made up of groups of commoditized resources – processor power, network bandwidth, storage capacity, etc. – connected through ‘buffering zones’ which are at their core virtualizers.

These connecting layers between resource pools will also provide the control points for infrastructure management. These connecting layers will be a loosely coupled network of policy enforcement engines – both providing the decoupling (virtualization) of the resources and enabling management policies to be injected, enforced, and visualized.

As data moves between servers and storage, policies will control access and placement. As traffic is moved from applications to end-users, policies will control security, quality of service, and even provisioning of additional resources.

IT operations will be provided a single unified view of the infrastructure and policies, enabling near-instant IT response to changes in the business environment.



It will be interesting to see how the virtualizers are eventually virtualized.